Theatrical lighting for live performances and movie and television production continues to increase in complexity. A typical theater employs hundreds of separate lights and lighting systems such as house lights, stage lights, scenery lighting, spotlights and various special effects. Typically, individual lights or groups of lights are controlled through dimmer circuits, which are located at remote locations from the lights for environmental considerations such as noise and temperature control.
Individual dimmer circuits are mounted in dimmer boxes, which contain power and signal distribution to the individual dimmer circuits. Control of dimmer boxes has been provided through lighting control consoles, which allow adjustment of individual dimmer circuits. Industry standards for communication between control consoles and dimmer boxes have been established by the United States Institute for Theater Technology, Inc. (“USITT”). For example, digital data transmission between control consoles and dimmer circuits has been established by the USITT in a standard identified as DMX or DMX512.
In various embodiments of dimmer boxes, structures have been provided that accept a number of dimmer circuits ranging from 6 to in excess of 200 and one or more plug-in control circuits. One significant drawback of the embodiments of dimmer boxes is that the dimmer boxes are large and heavy. This adds significantly to the cost of operating theatrical lighting. This drawback is demonstrated in theatrical and television settings where lighting crews associated with a musical or theatrical production repeatedly are required to set up lighting connectors at multiple locations, often on sequential days as the production changes from one theatrical scene to another theatrical scene (e.g., from day to night scenes). Each of these scenes often has its own lighting requirements and unique electrical power connectors that may have to be physically changed with other electrical power connectors used at other scenes. However, because the set up time allowed is often of a short duration and because of the varying conditions of compatibility of existing lighting systems from scene to scene, each new set up presents a different and sometimes complex set-up scenario for lighting crews. This situation is further exacerbated by the hard wired nature of the electrical power connectors inside the dimmer boxes. That is, lighting crews are forced to hard wire electrical power connectors to the dimmer boxes that are compatible with the lighting system of the current theatrical scene. This task is time consuming and requires a significant dedication of resources in a situation that is often associated with short time durations in which to accomplish the electrical connector swap out.
As such, there is a need to provide economical and/or efficient methods and systems for increasing a number of lights operated and/or controlled by dimmer boxes of theatrical light systems.